Comcast's discounted Internet use spikes

More than 2,500 Twin Cities families are participating in Comcast's program to offer discount Internet broadband service to low-income families, a more than fourfold jump over the 2011 inaugural year, the cable giant said Tuesday, March 5.

The Internet Essentials program is open to families with children enrolled in the federal school lunch program. It was a requirement for government approval of Philadelphia-based Comcast's 2011 merger with NBC/Universal.

Nationwide, Comcast has signed up more than 150,000 families to the program, Executive Vice President David Cohen said. The program is helping more than 600,000 people reach the Internet, an audience almost equal in size to the population of Washington, D.C., or Boston, he said.

In the Twin Cities, the program added 2,100 families last year versus 454 in 2011, company officials said.

Internet Essentials offers broadband service for $10 a month and is designed to help bridge the "digital divide" between Americans with fast Internet connections to use for work and school and those without.

The Twin Cities program initially offered relatively slow 1.5 megabits-per-second service in 2011, but it upgraded the speed to 3 megabits per second by 2012, Comcast spokeswoman Mary Beth Schubert said.

According to some experts, at 1.5 megabits-per-second, a movie download will take more than two hours; at 3 megabits per second, the same download will take about half that time.

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Part of the program also includes the option to buy an Internet-ready desktop or laptop computer from Comcast for $150 and training on how to use the Internet.

The program targets families with children because recent surveys show an overwhelming majority of teachers require their students to go online to download assignments or homework, Cohen said.

An education survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, released last week, noted that teachers of the nation's lowest-income students were more than twice as likely to say that their students' lack of access to digital technology was "a major challenge" to using more digital teaching tools.

The top three metro areas participating in the program are Chicago, with 15,593 families; Miami-Dade in Florida, with 13,930 families; and Atlanta, with 11,127 families, Cohen said.

The Twin Cities ranked 13th, behind Indianapolis and ahead of Portland, Ore., Schubert said. Comcast is the primary cable and Internet provider in the Twin Cities.

"We want to continue to be aggressive with our Internet Essentials program so we continue to grow the program," she said.

The cable company next will expand the program to include private, parochial and home-schooled students. Families in those schools will have to meet the same eligibility requirements as students in the free lunch programs in public schools, Schubert said.